In this refreshingly social take on a personal experience, psychologist Fernyhough aims to debunk the myth that memory is purely retrospective—memories, he argues, are not “heirloom[s] from the past” summoned back for display in the present; they are momentary reconstructions.

The author talks about memory as a collage, coming from lots of different places in the brain. I liked the idea of using silver foil to illuminate some of the dots on the cover design – it gets across the idea that some memories burn really bright in our heads, while others are more blurred. As the book catches the light, the dots either shine or fall back – just like memories at certain points in our lives.

I did a Q&A with Jeff Glor of CBS News, who asked me about the inspiration behind the book, and to whom I confessed about what I might be doing if I wasn't a writer and academic:

I have a part-time academic post, and I conduct research on topics such as hallucinations and child development as well as memory. If I had to give up all the bookish stuff completely, I'd be trying to make it as a progressive rock guitarist. Yeah, I know.

Durham University professor Charles Fernyhough offers an absorbing guidebook to the mysterious terrain of human memory with his second nonfiction work, Pieces of Light. In the tradition of Oliver Sacks’ casually shrewd scientific writing, the book blends dispatches from the frontiers of science with compassionate human anecdotes. Although this exploration never shies away from formidable science and challenging psychological concepts (like contextual “flashbulb memories,” which can be startlingly vivid and completely false), Fernyhough reinforces his lessons with elegant personal memoirs and pop-culture references. (Harry Potter, Princess Diana, and Andy Warhol all make cameos.) For a topic so elusive—discussed in methods that range from the allegorical “crazy woman” to the brain’s mysterious mechanics—Fernyhough’s enthralling narrative delivers gripping insight on the way memories shape our lives.

Thinking about this book made me realize that remembering more stuff isn't necessarily better. Being able to recall every card in a pack of playing cards or recall pi to the thousandth decimal place — why? Why would you want to do that? It's no use to me. For some people it might be important, but it's no use at all for me. What I would like to do is remember the stuff that I remember better, in more detail, more vividly.

In all of these inquiries one thing has been clear to me. To understand autobiographical memory in its full richness, you need to get at it from the inside: as a subjective experience, as well as something that can be studied in the psychology or neuroscience lab. You need to ask what having a memory is like, and not be satisfied with purely objective descriptions of the phenomenon.

Bracing as it might be, this new way of thinking about memory does not have to lead to self-doubt. It simply requires that we take our memories with a pinch of salt, and forge new relationships with them. They may be a kind of fiction, but the manner of their making speaks volumes about those who create them. In the Obama-Ahmadinejad study, the researchers found that events were more likely to be falsely recalled if they fit the individual’s political affiliations (conservatives were more likely than liberals to ‘remember’ the Ahmadinejad handshake, for example). Whether the events happened or not, your biases and beliefs shape the kind of memories you form, and thus reveal the kind of person you are.

Friday, March 8, 2013

Pieces of Light is published in the US on 19 March. In the run-up to publication, I have been answering some questions about how the book came about and what I hoped to achieve with it. The questions are from the wonderful Heather Drucker at HarperCollins.

Q.: As you explain in the book, as a psychology undergrad in the late 1980s, memory was too immeasurable and too subjective to interest you. Can you explain how your perspective has changed since then?

I think I’ve come to realize that the mind is too vast and special a thing to be reduced to numbers. Particularly with a phenomenon like memory, you have to try and get at the experience from the inside, and that means exploring what memories mean to the individual. In my view, the science of human experience has to be multidisciplinary; the insights of artists, philosophers and social scientists can add a huge amount to what we can learn from psychology experiments and neuroimaging.

Q.: How has your work as a fiction writer inspired your interest in memory?

Novelists deal in memory; it’s their seed corn. As a writer of fiction, you have to be interested in the experiences of your characters, and one of the ways writers create vivid characters is by giving them memories. You don’t just get to feel a great novelistic character’s thoughts, emotions, desires, and secrets; you also get to share in their re-experiencing of the past. In the book, I explore the idea that a novelist’s creation of a fictional memory has much in common with how autobiographical memory works in all of us: through the pulling together of different sources of information, and the shaping of those constructions by the needs of the present moment.

Q.: In the first chapter of the book, you return to Sydney, to find locations from your first novel The Auctioneer. Can you explain the role that imagination plays in our memory?

The idea that imagination is intimately linked to memory has a very long pedigree, but current research in psychology and neuroscience is putting a new spin on it. We don’t store memories as complete, immutable representations of the past; rather, we construct them from their constituent parts whenever the need arises. That’s how imagination works too: we take things that we know and we put them together in new ways. This turns out to be a very powerful idea for understanding the quirks of autobiographical memory, and it’s supported by some intriguing new research which seems to show that imagination and memory share common pathways in the brain.

Q.: Quoting Marcel Proust and Andy Warhol, you explore the role of senses in our autobiographical memory. Do things such as smells and music have the power to unlock our memories?

Sensory stimuli can be incredibly effective cues to memory. It’s often assumed that smell is a special case, perhaps because of its direct anatomical connections to the memory systems of the brain, but the picture is more complicated than that. Music may share many of smell’s special powers, and I describe how songs can cue memories in ordinary people but also in the case of one remarkable individual with dense amnesia. I also describe how people with amnesia who benefit from using SenseCam (a small camera worn around the neck) find that lost memories are brought back to consciousness by other kinds of sensory cue: in this case, visual ones.

Q.: Freud once called it the “remarkable amnesia of childhood,” but as you show in PIECES OF LIGHT, there may be many reasons why few people remember much before the age of 4. Why is language so important when it comes to retaining childhood memories? And what other factors play a role in childhood amnesia?

At the present time, we don’t understand childhood amnesia very well. It can’t be a simple matter of brain maturation, as the boundary of childhood amnesia seems to shift as we get older. School-age kids remember much further back into their early years than we adults do. Language is important, I think, because it gives us a way of organizing and making sense of our experience, and more organized and elaborated information sticks better in memory. As far as other factors are concerned, one suggestion is that the ability to construct a narrative is the last piece of the puzzle. Once kids can tell a story, they can start to do autobiographical memory.

Q.: You write about your need to seed the memory of your father in your children who have never met him. How can our memory be tricked into retaining first-person memories for events we have never experienced?

There’s good evidence now that many people are susceptible to the creation of false memories. The reason for this stems from memory’s reconstructive nature. In constructing a memory, we pull together lots of different kinds of information, including—occasionally—some information that shouldn’t be in the memory at all. Experiments have shown that simply imagining an event makes it more likely that you will later falsely ‘remember’ it happening. And social factors are very important in this process. I write about some recent findings that siblings often claim each other’s memories as their own, suggesting that our memories are constantly being reshaped by those around us.

Q.: What do you think the future holds for the treatment of eyewitness testimony?

Memory’s reconstructive nature means that it can be unreliable, and the fallibility of eyewitness testimony in particular has been demonstrated again and again. Things are starting to change in the legal system in recognition of this well-documented fallibility, although there is still some debate about just how this kind of evidence should be treated in court. I expect to see jurors and those working in the legal professions getting more training in how and particularly why, memory is unreliable.

Q.: What new research is being explored in terms of memory manipulation for sufferers of PTSD and other trauma victims?

I talked at length with one victim of trauma who had benefited from EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), which involves a very simple procedure of watching a light move from side to side as you try to recall the traumatic events. No one really understands how EMDR works, and many are skeptical about its efficacy. Neuroscientists are also working towards targeting specific emotional memories in the brain, through injecting proteins that block memory formation, and they’ve had some success in experiments with mice. The trouble is, human memory is a much more complex process, with many different neural and cognitive systems involved. Despite the recent hype, my own view is that a ‘forgetting pill’ is still a long way off.

Q.: In the book, you write, “memories are constructions, made in the present moment; they are not direct lines to the events themselves.” This idea of reconstructive memory is one that is widely accepted by science, but little understood by the public. What new understanding do you hope readers will gain from PIECES OF LIGHT?

People do understand that memory can be unreliable, but they don’t always understand how and why it’s unreliable. If you ask large samples of people whether, say, memory works like a video camera, you find that most say that it does. I hope that people will enjoy reading about this fascinating area of research, and appreciate why I’ve tried to bring it back to human stories. It’s not just about the brain: it’s about the person, their past, their social and cultural contexts—all the different ways they make meaning of their experiences. Some people have told me that reading this book has given them a different relationship to their own memory. It’s one of the most extraordinary abilities we have, and knowing more about its powers and shortcomings can help us appreciate it even more.

Buy A Box Of Birds

Buy Pieces of Light (UK)

A Box of Birds: Reviews

'Arrestingly good prose… A thought-provoking novel that wrestles with the fundamentals of human nature.' Financial Times

'The plot, which flies past at genuine ‘page turner’ pace, involves a race to map the (fictional) Lorenzo Circuit, ‘the deep root-system of the self… the basis of memory, emotion and consciousness in the human brain’… I’m grateful for the siren warnings from the storytelling machine that is Charles Fernyhough.' The Psychologist

'A pleasantly sardonic narrator… There is… a certain edgy propulsion to the story, and the reveal of what is really going on in the bowels of Sansom’s research centre is deliciously horrible and deftly understated.' Guardian

'Part love story, part race against time to beat the baddies, Fernyhough can certainly write.' Daily Mail

'It’s rare these days to read a writer who cares about ideas in the way that the great nineteenth-century novelists did... This is both a serious novel and a great read.' Sara Maitland

'Exhilarating, thought-provoking and well worth the wait.' Andrew Crumey

Pieces of Light: Reviews

'Pieces of Light is utterly fascinating and superbly written. I learned more about memory from this book than any other. There are few science books around of this class.' Guardian

'Thoughtful… a deft guide to discoveries that have led memory researchers to stress the centrality of storytelling.' Booklist

'As absorbing as it is thought-provoking.' Sunday Business Post

'Remarkable storytelling skills... Seamlessly intersperses the personal aspects of [his] journey with descriptions of cutting-edge research into spatial naviation and memory manipulation, as well as new ideas about how memory works.' Moheb Costandi, Scientific American MIND

'With elegance and clinical sympathy, Fernyhough tells the stories of patients with various forms of brain damage that result in amnesia... a good, accessible read for anyone interested in their own recollections.' Professor Steven Rose, BBC Focus Magazine

'An absorbing guidebook to the mysterious terrain of human memory... In the tradition of Oliver Sacks’ casually shrewd scientific writing, the book blends dispatches from the frontiers of science with compassionate human anecdotes. Fernyhough’s enthralling narrative delivers gripping insight on the way memories shape our lives.'Editors’ Choice for w/c 19 March, iBookstore

'Weaving scientific research from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Fernyhough explains that our brains don’t record experiences as cameras do; rather, we store key elements, then reconstruct the experiences when we need them, imbuing them with present-day feelings and the benefit of hindsight.' Washington Post(read more)

'In its stunning blend of the literary with the scientific, Pieces of Light illuminates ordinary and extraordinary stories to remind us that who we are now has everything to do with who we were once, and that identity itself is intricately rooted in transporting moments of remembrance. We are what we remember.' André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Harvard Square

'His examination [is] welcoming and accessible to lay readers. His analysis is wide-ranging... He also covers a wide swath of literary and historical ground... A refreshingly social take on an intensely personal experience.' Publishers Weekly (read more)

'A multidisciplinary approach to explaining memory... Will be intriguing for readers interested in the borderlands where memoir, fiction and science overlap.' Kirkus Reviews (read more)

'In this lyrical exploration of our powers of recall, psychologist and novelist Charles Fernyhough argues that our memories are worth cherishing - even though some of what we think we remember is, in fact, fiction.' New Scientist Books of the Year (read more)

'In Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough has had the arresting idea of writing a book about memory that is also a memoir. As a psychologist clearly well up on the latest research, he shows how memory itself relies on language and storytelling. Investigating his own memories with a writerly eye, he brings to vibrant life scenes from a childhood refreshingly free of misery.' Sunday Times Books of the Year (read more)

'In his hybrid of autobiography, journalism and pop psychology, Fernyhough lets the stories speak for themselves to highlight memory’s personal, subjective and fragile qualities. Fernyhough takes us on a captivating journey into the mind. And he does so with great style.' Telegraph (read more)

'Outstanding… Fernyhough’s skills as a writer are evident both in the beautiful prose and in the way he uses literature to illustrate his argument… He draws on both science and art to marvellous effect.' Observer (read more)

'Restrained and lyrical... an immense pleasure.' New Scientist (read more)

'A sophisticated blend of findings from science, ideas from literature and examples from personal narratives… refreshing, well judged and at times moving. This is an unusual book but a very rewarding one.' Times Higher Education (read more)

'Fernyhough deftly guides us through memory's many facets... Often using himself as a test case, he adds context with research and snippets from a raft of great writers. A thoughtful study of how we make sense of ourselves.' Nature (read more)

'Absorbing... In offering us a meditation on memory, Fernyhough has something important to say about one of the forces that is central to our lives.' The Lady (read more)

'Fernyhough is a gifted writer who can turn any experience into lively prose... The stories in Pieces of Light... will entertain anyone who reads them.' Financial Times (read more)

'Many popular science writers try to blend the autobiographical and the anecdotal into their work; few do it as seamlessly and successfully as Charles Fernyhough.' Blackwell's Book Podcasts (read more)

'Fernyhough argues that we don’t simply possess a memory; we reconstruct it anew every time we need to remember… Through his own experiences and those of others, from the very young to the very old, he explores the mystery of remembering and the ambiguity of forgetting.' Saga Magazine

'An enthralling investigation of that ‘thing’ we call memory… manages to write about complex things in a clear and understandable way.' Ian McMillan, The Verb

'Pieces of Light will both linger in your memory and change the way you think about it.’ Daniel L. Schacter